I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
I wrestled when I was a kid. That started me off with the discipline, because making weight was my responsibility. It is a team sport, but it is also a solo sport.
I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.
Cycling is unique in that in any other sport I'd be in a different weight category or discipline. What I do is a different sport to what Chris Froome does.
I've always played sport, ever since I was little. I played volleyball and I believe sport teaches you a lot, such as teamwork, respect and discipline.
The spirit of the Olympic movement is great for young people because it teaches them about the training and discipline required to compete. Even if they don't make the teams, they can rededicate their lives to the art of sport, discipline, and physical fitness.
Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.
The distraction, particularly of technology, impedes the innovative process. And when you add to that the distraction of working with colleagues who are in different time zones and/or who have a different approach to urgency and distraction, the potential for losing focus is abundant.
It's not just self defense, it's about...self control, body discipline, and mind discipline...and breath techniques. It involves yoga. It involves meditation. It's an art, not a sport.
Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives in short, all the technical laws and customs which he encounters in office or factory.
It takes a lot of discipline to become and stay champion. It also takes a lot of discipline to stop while still feeling that you're in the best physical and mental shape of your life, but I've always planned to leave the sport when I'm at the top and in good health.
Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.
There is only one sort of discipline - PERFECT DISCIPLINE. Men cannot have good battle discipline and poor administrative discipline.
Zen is discipline - the discipline of living life, the discipline of taking a breath, the discipline of not knowing and not trying to know.
The age in which we live, this non-stop distraction, is making it more impossible for the young generation to ever have the curiosity or discipline... because you need to be alone to find out anything.
Discipline isn't a dirty word. Far from it. Discipline is the one thing that separates us from chaos and anarchy. Discipline implies timing. It's the precursor to good behavior, and it never comes from bad behavior. People who associate discipline with punishment are wrong: with discipline, punishment is unnecessary.